George
Berkeley,
Human Knowledge. Part I [all published]. Wherein the chief Causes of Error and Difficulty in the Sciences, with the Grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion, are inquir’d into

Berkeley’s most important work, published in Dublin, in which he sought to establish his doctrine of immaterialism as the basis of religious belief. Although called “Part I”, part II was never published and, in a letter to a friend dated 1730, Berkeley wrote that he had made considerable progress with the second part but had lost the manuscript about fourteen years earlier during his travels in Italy. Hume regarded the work as “one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters ....” “Whatever doctrine contradicts vulgar and settled opinion had need been introduced with great caution into the world. For this reason it was I omitted all mention of the non-existence of matter in the title-page, dedication, preface, and introduction, that so the notion might steal unawares on the reader.” Berkeley’s letter to Percival, Sept. 6, 1710.

Anthony
Collins,
Priestcraft in Perfection: or, a Detection of the Fraud of Inserting and Continuing this Clause (The Church hath Power to Decree Rites and Ceremonys, and Authority in Controversys of Faith) in the Twentieth Article of the Articles of the Church of England

Written in French and Leibniz’s only work was published during his lifetime; it became the source of the popular view of his philosophy.

Jonathan
Swift,
A Meditation upon a Broomstick, and somewhat beside

Simon de Patot
Tyssot,
Voyages et avantures de Jaques Mass‚

The text is dated 1710 but is was probably published in the Hague between 1714 and 1717. Tyssot's tale of an imaginary voyage became extremely popular during the eighteenth century and was read by Montesquieu, Swift, and Voltaire.

“. . . very precisely dated to November 1711. For anyone who thinks of Fénelon as a vapid storyteller or an airy mystic exiled from the realities of French life, this score of notes will come as a rude shock. They contain nothing less than a list of detailed policies to be implemented immediately after the death of Louis XIV, of exactly the kind one imagines every modern opposition party draws up secretly on the eve of a general election. They range from the widest questions of practical governance (size of the Council, rearrangement local authorities, ecclesiastical relations with Rome and, above all, modes of taxation) to highly personal topics: whom to trust and whom not to, which generals to back and which to retire, what to do with invalid veterans, and so forth. These are the jottings of a potential First Minister, not of a provincial archbishop. The reason they were written late in 1711 was the real chance translating such policies into reality when, on the death of the Grand Dauphin in that year, Fénelon’s adoring former pupil, the Duc de Bourgogne, became the heir apparant to his elderly and ailing grandfather. It was generally assumed that Fénelon would be the leading personality of the new reign. All hopes were dashed when the new Dauphin himself died, aged only twenty, in 1712. We are dealing with a man who was within an ace of governing France, in ways that would almost certainly have changed the shape of history, and who was cheated by a fatal epidemic of measles. To put it at the most modest estimate, not since Richelieu would there have been a person of such intellectual rigour at the forefront of European affairs.” (Peter Bayley, review of Fénelon, Oeuvres II, in TLS, 1 May, 1998)

John
Gay,
The Present State of Wit

Bernard
Mandeville,
Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions

Mandaville made his career in London as a doctor, having established in the 1690’s a medical practice in which he treated patients suffering from hypochondria, hysteria and other nervous disorders.

Alexander
Pope,
Essay on Criticism

Pope’s contribution to the debate, begun in France, between the Ancients and Moderns; supporting the Ancients (‘Moderns beware!’) earned Pope’s the praise of Voltaire as the ‘the Boileau of England’.

Richard
Steele,
The Spectator

Periodical which appeared between 1 March, 1711and 6 December 1712, and revived by Addison for 24 numbers from 18 June to 29 September, 1714. Joseph Addison wrote half of the 555 papers, covering social satire and literary criticism.

In the famous tenth number Addison wrote clearly about his aims for his readers: “I shall spare no Pains to make their Instruction agreeable, and their Diversion useful. For which Reasons I shall endeavour to enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality . . . It was said of Socrates, that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven, to inhabit among Men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of the Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables, and in Coffee-houses”.

Addison wished to bring people together for reasonable discussion. He found extreme party politics distasteful; in No. 125 he wrote, “there cannot a greater judgement befall a country than such a dreadful spirit of division as rends a government into two distinct peoples and makes them greater strangers and more averse to one another than if they were actually two different nations.”

Addison’s essays on the pleasures of the imagination, which constituted eleven number of the Spectator, became famous and were extremely influential during the 18th century and left their mark on Hume, Voltaire and Kant. “We cannot indeed have a single Image in the Fancy that did not make its first Entrance through the Sight; but we have the Power of retaining, altering and compounding those Images, which we have once received, into all the varieties of Picture and Vision that are most agreeable to the Imagination.” (No. 411) “The very Life and highest Perfection of Poetry has something in it like Creation; It bestows a kind of Existence, and draws up to the Reader’s View, several Objects which are not to be found in Being.” (No. 421)

Jonathan
Swift,
Miscellanies

A collection of essay’s including the Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man and the Argument against Abolishing Christianity.

Jonathan
Swift,
The Conduct of the Allies and of the late Ministry in beginning and carrying on the present war

A pamphlet in which Swift supported the Tories, advocating peace in the War of the Spanish Succession. It appeared on 27 November 1711, some weeks before the motion in favour of peace was finally carried in Parliament.

Voltaire,
A M. Duché

Voltaire,
Fragments d' une trag‚die intitul‚e Amulius et Numitor

A tragedy based on the story of Romulus and Remus; Voltaire destroyed the manuscript and only two fragments have survived.

Voltaire,
Les Souhaits

William
Whiston,
Primitive Christianity Revived

Published in 5 volumes between 1711 and 1712, an interpretation of early Christian texts printed in orginal Greek and Latin with an English translation.

1712

John
Arbuthnot ,
The History of John Bull

Collection of five pamphlets previously published separately. A political and comic allegory, modeled on Swift’s Conduct of the Allies, which advocates an end to war with France; its chief actors, concerned with the treaty of Utrecht, are caricatured as Lord Strutt (Charles II of Spain), Lewis Baboon (Louis XIV), Nicolas Frog (the Dutch) and John Bull (the English). John Bull, “in the main . . . an honest plain dealing fellow, choleric, bold, and of a very unconstant temper”, is a national hero who is nearly tricked by the duplicities of the other national heroes and by the self-centredness of Humphrey Hocus the attorney (the duke of Marlborough).

Henri
Boulainvilliers,
Essai de m‚taphysique dans les principes de BenoŒt de Spinoza (Essay on the Metaphysics Following the Principles of Baruch de Spinoza)

Written circa 1712 but only widely circulated from 1731.

Samuel
Clarke,
The Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity

A work which caused a prolonged controversy, in which Clarke was accused of Arianism. The Arians like the Socinians and Unitarians were antitrinitarians where Christ is seen not as an equal in divinity with God, but as the highest - indeed uniquely so - form of man. Newton and Locke were both Unitarians.

Jean Pierre de
Crousaz,
Nouvel essai de logique

John
Dennis,
Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare

François
Lamy,
De la connaissance et de l'amour de Dieu, avec l'art de faire un bon usage des afflictions de cette vie (Concerning the Knowledge and the Love of God, with the Art of Making Good Use of the Afflictions of This Life)

Jonathan
Swift,
A Proposal for correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English Tongue

Jonathan
Swift,
History of the Four Last Years of the Queen

Written in 1712-13 but not published until 1758, one of a number of historical accounts Swift wrote of the Oxford-Bolingbroke administration. The History was supplemented with an account of the Tories rise to power in 1710 and an Enquiry into the Queen’s Last Ministry. Both remained unpublished until after his death. Hoblach and M.Eidous translated and published a French edition in Amsterdam in 1765.

Voltaire,
Ode sur le voeu de Louis XIII

Voltaire,
Epigramme ['Danchet, si m‚pris‚ jadis' ]

1713

Joseph
Addison,
Cato

Staged at Drury Lane and proved successful, partly because it was perceived as a defense of the Whigs. Protrays the last days of Cato (95-46BC), the “conscience of Rome” who was severely critical of Caesar and the Triumvirate, and his suicide after defeat at Utica. Translated into several languages, Voltaire called it the finest tragedy in the English language and Dr. Johnson considered it “unquestionably the noblest production of Addison’s genius”, although he described it as “rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language than a representation of natural affections.”

Jane
Barker,
Love Intrigues

The first of three of Barker’s novels featuring the semi-autobiographical narrator heroine Galesia, the other works being A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1713) and The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen (1726). Barker was a Catholic convert and a strong Stuart supporter, new biographical research has revealed that her father was associated with the court of Charles I, and that she had family connections with the pro-Stuart Connocks. After the overthrow of James II by William of Orange in 1688, Barker left England to join the exiled court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in France. It was in exile that Barker wrote many of her political poems which have only recently been published.

Richard
Bentley,
Remarks upon a late Discourse of Freethinking

A refutation of Anthony Collins's A Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713).

George
Berkeley,
Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous

Anthony
Collins,
A Discourse of Freethinking Occasioned by the Rise and Growth of a Sect Called Freethinkers

Probably Collins best-known work in which he defends freedom of expression; it caused a sensation and was bitterly attacked by most of the leading writers of the time, including Swift, Addison, Berkeley, Bentley, Hoadly and Steele. His position is generally thought to be deistic; however there is evidence to suggest that he was an atheist. According to Berkeley, Collins claimed to have a proof for the non-existence of God; and many of his published statements seem to hint at, or imply, atheism. T. H. Huxley described him as the ‘Goliath of Freethought’.

There were at least five contemporary editions, all of which appear to be the first edition. However, the true first editions contains the famous, and probably deliberate mistranslation “idiot evangelists” (for “idiotis evangelistis” on p.90) and the Errata, most of which were also probably deliberate, enabling Collins to say something subversive while appearing to retract it, as for example with the fourth erratum “If a Man be under an Obligation to list to any Revelation at all” - which is really the main question of Collins’ Discourse. The Discourse was translated into French in 1714 and went into a second French edition three years later.

William
Derham,
Physico-Theology: or, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from the Works of Creation

Published from 1713 to 1717, and widely publicized through later abridgements, it was admired by Rousseau who produced a modified edition, with accompanying essay in 1756. Voltaire’s reaction in 1761, though he admired the humanitarianism of Saint-Pierre, was harsh: “They said peace, peace and there was no peace, and this mad Diogenes of a Rousseau proposes perpetual peace.” (Quoted in M.L. Perkins, “Voltaire’s Concept of International Order,” Voltaire Studies, XXXVI, 1965) It was translated into English in 1714. Saint-Pierre was one of the first to propose setting up an international organisation for the maintenance of peace.

Richard
Steele,
The Guardian

Periodical published between 12 March and 1 October, 1713, to which Addison contributed 51 numbers.

Jonathan
Swift,
Mr Collins' Discourse of Free-thinking

Voltaire,
Ode sur les malheurs du temps

1714

George
Berkeley,
The Ladies Library. Written by a Lady

Published in three volumes by Steele in London. A very popular improving work, one of a number published during the latter half of the 17th and early part of the 18th centuries. The traditional attribution to Lady Wray, Jeremy Taylor’s grand-daughter, is now to be dismissed, as the contract for the work between Steele and Bishop Berkeley survives in the Osborn collection at Yale. “It might be thought strange that Berkeley should use the nom de plume ‘written by a Lady’. In fact he seldom used his own name on a title-page. .... Most of the Ladies Library is made up of long, unaltered quotations from ‘the best English authors’. In some cases quotations are revised and words added or subtracted. Occasionally, whole paragraphs are added, especially by way of introduction or transition. .... The Contract and Preface plainly point to Berkeley as being entirely responsible for the body of the work. And it may also be assumed that he wrote the Introduction in Volume 1 ....” Berkeley Newsletter, No. 4. “For a complete record of Berkeley’s contributions, one must examine the Ladies Library against the original texts of those authors such as Fenelon, Taylor, and Fleetwood, whom Berkeley at times thoroughly and extensively rewrites and expands, weaving his own arguments through and against theirs in a way that makes the extrication of ‘insertions’ difficult.” Newsletter, No. 11.

Jean Pierre de
Crousaz,
Trait‚du beau

An account of subjective differences in aesthetic judgements.

François de Salignac de La Mothe
Fénelon,
Dialogues sur l'‚loquence

Work was completed in 1674.

Nicolas
Fréret,
Sur l’orgine des Francs

Historian, voluminous author and friend of Montesquieu, Fréret was admitted as pupil to the Academy of Inscriptions in 1714. His memoir, Sur l’orgine des Francs, led to his internment in the Bastille in 1715 for libeling the monarchy. He was one of the first scholars of Europe to undertake the study of the Chinese language. Fréret’s patron was the comte de Boulainvilliers.

Verse tragedy which made Voltaire’s name. He started to work on the play in his late teens and it was first performed on 18 November 1718, it ran for twenty-nine nights and was seen by over 25,000 people.

Voltaire,
Le Bourbier

Voltaire,
EpŒtre … M. l' abb‚ Servien

Voltaire,
Lettre … M. D***

Voltaire,
Sur Lamotte

Voltaire,
Le Crocheteur borgne (The One-Eyed Porter)

Voltaire's first know short story.

Voltaire,
L' Anti-Giton

1715

Jane
Barker,
Exilius

A story of a father’s attempt to rape his daughter. The daughter, Clarinthia, tells her own story, and Barker, in the Preface, recounts that she was prompted to write about this shocking subject because she had heard of a similar contemporary case “and so writ the Character to render it detestable”.

Hermann
Boerhaave,
Oratio de comparando certo in physicis

A published lecture in which Boerhaave outlined an approach to physics that his pupils were to follow for decades: Newton’s theory of attraction is the true explanation of celestial and terrestrial phenomena, while Newton’s modest declaration of ignorance concerning its cause and nature is the true method of scientific enquiry.

Writing as a Christian in defence necessitarianism, Collins aimed to demonstrate how it was from their lack of liberty that revealed men to be perfect, creatures: liberty is “both the real foundation of popular atheism and...the professed principle of the atheists themselves”. Collins unites Hobbes metaphysical determinism and Locke’s psychic determinism. The work was translated into French in 1754 and referred to by Melchior Grimm in his Correspondance littéraire in December of the same year. Attacked by Samuel Clarke, Collins published a reply, Liberty and Necessity, after Clarke’s death in 1729.

John
Gay,
The What D’Ye Call It

A burlesque on what Gay thought to be the moral and emotional falsity of heroic tragedy, the play was attacked by Pope’s enemies, whom Gay befriended.

Bernard
Nieuwentijt,
Het regt gebruik der wereltbeschouwingen, ter overtuiginge van ongodisten en ongelovigen (The Right Use of Contemplating the World, Designed to Convince Atheists and Unbelievers)

Influential work in which Nieuwentijt sought to defend Christainty using experimental philosophy. An eighth edition appeared in 1759; it was translated into French and German, and into English as The Religious Philosopher, or, The Right Use of Contemplating the Works of the Creator (1718; 3d ed., 1730).

Alexander
Pope,
Iliad

Translated and sold in instalments by subscription between 1715 and 1720, a new practice at the time for which Pope made nine thousand pounds. Some contemporary critics claimed Pope’s use of pentameter couplets failed to capture the grandeur of Homer’s unrhymed hexameters. Dr. Bentley remarked: “a very pretty poem, Mr Pope; but you must not call it Homer.”

Nicholas
Rowe,
The Tragedy of the Lady Jane Grey

Richard
Steele,
Political Writings

Collection of essays and pamphlets which caused controversary.

Voltaire,
EpŒtre … M. le duc d' Aremberg

Voltaire,
Cosi-Sancta (A Saint of Sorts)

A short story set in Hippo, North Africa, birthplace of St Augustine, in which a wife saves the lives of her husband, son and brother by sleeping with a proconsul, a doctor and a local chief.

George
Hickes,
The Constitution of the Catholic Church and the Nature and Consequences of Schism

Posthumous, a work which gave rise to the Bangorian controversy.

Benjamin
Hoadly,
A Preservative Against the Principles and Practices of the NonJurors Both in Church and State

A work directed against the posthumously published writings of Georges Hickes which complements Hoadly’s sermon defending individualism in religion entitled “The Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ.” The Preservative started a controversy concerning the limits of civil disobedience; the sermon led to a pamphlet war, known as the Bangorian controversy (Hoadly was bishop of Bangor in 1716), concerning the nature of ecclesiastical authority and incidentally to the suspension of convocation (1717) for its opposition to Hoadly’s views. One of the most important replies to the sermon was William Law’s Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor.

Pierre
Marivaux,
L'Iliade travestie (A Travesty of the ?Iliad?)

Mary Wortley
Montagu,
Town Eclogues

Voltaire,
EpŒtre … M. le duc d' Orl‚ans, r‚gent

Voltaire,
EpŒtre … Mme de Gondrin

Voltaire,
Au r‚gent

Voltaire,
EpŒtre … Mme de *** ['De cet agr‚able rivage' ]

Voltaire,
EpŒtre … M. l' abb‚ de Bussy

Voltaire,
Sur M. le duc d' Orléans et Mme de Berry

Voltaire,
Le Cocuage

Voltaire,
Le Cadenas (The Padlock)

Poem in which a 60 year old husband uses a chastity belt to guarantee his young wife's faithfulness.

Voltaire,
A Mme la duchesse de Berry

Voltaire,
A Mlle de L., pendant une maladie de l' auteur

Voltaire,
Ode. La chambre de justice

Voltaire,
EpŒtre … M. le prince EugŠne

Voltaire,
A Mme la duchesse d' Orléans

Voltaire,
A M. l' abbé de Chaulieu

Voltaire,
Nuit blanche de Sully

1717

Samuel
Clarke,
A Collection of Papers, which passed between the late learned Mr. Leibniz and Dr. Clarke in the years 1715-1716, relating to the Principles of Natural Philosophy and Religion

Translated into German and French in 1720. The work was widely read and Voltaire, who used it in his Éléments de la philosophie de Newton, wrote, “it is perhaps the finest monument we have of literary combat”.

Jeremy
Collier,
Reasons for Restoring Some Prayers

John
Gay,
Three Hours After Marriage

Written in collaboration with Pope and Arbuthnot, a satire caricaturing a number of contemporary literay figures, including John Dennis, Colley Ciber and Anne Finch. The play was at first a success, but its production caused a furious row between Gay and Cibber, and it was not revived for another twenty years.

Voltaire,
La Bastille

1718

Edmund
Curll,
Treatise of Hermaphrodites

On the basis of this work Curll was prosecuted for obscenity. He defended himself by insisting "the fault is not in the Subject Matter, but the Inclination of the Reader, that makes these Pieces offensive". The work was later reprinted as The use of Flogging, as provocative to the pleasures of love. With some Remarks on the Office of the Loins and reins in 1761

John Henry
Meibomius,
A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs

"There are Persons who are stimulated to Venery by Strokes of Rods, and worked up into a Flame of Lust by Blows, and that the Part, which distinguishes us to be Men, should be raised by the Charm of invigorating Lashes".

John
Toland,
Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gentille, and Mahometan Christianity

An account of the role of the Ebionites in the development of the early Christian Church.

Voltaire,
La Douce vengeance par M. Arouet

Voltaire,
Au duc de Lorraine L‚opold

Voltaire,
EpŒtre … S. A. S. Mgr le prince de Conti

1719

Jacques
Basnage,
Annales des provinces unies

Written after Basnage was appointed Dutch historiographer.

Abbé du
Bos,
R‚flexions critiques sur la po‚sie et sur la peinture

De Bos became a French refugee in Holland. An English translation, under the title Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting appeared in London in 1748.

Henri
Boulainvilliers,
Traité des trois imposteurs

Treatise, first edited in 1719 under the title L’Esprit de Spinosa, widely circulated, rarely as a printed book, more often as a manuscript. Manuscripts of Boulainvilliers work were known by his contemporaries though none were printed during his lifetime, (well over two hundred copies of the work exist in libraries all over Europe and America). Boulainvilliers rejected both the idea of absolute monarchy and government by the people. He wrote on the history of the French nobility, praising the feudal system, showed interest in the occult sciences - he prophesied the date of the death of Louis XIV - and wrote a life of Mohammed. He was admired by Voltaire.

Daniel
Defoe,
The Life and strange surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Published in Feburary in an edition of 1,000, like almost all of Defoe’s work, Robinson Crusoe was followed some months later by its sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe was not known to his contemporaries as a novelist; his fictional writings appeared anonymously, and most were not attributed to him until several decades after his death. Robinson Crusoe was a commercial success and was translated into French and German in 1720 and Swedish in 1734.

Abbé
Dubos,
Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music

Translated into English in 1748 by Thomas Nugent, who also translated Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois. A defence, in the ‘battle of the books’, that in the arts the moderns and superseded the ancients. “A pioneering, widely quoted, and highly appreciated book”, which “celebrated the imagination, creative genius, and taste without denigrating knowledge and restraint.” (Gay, vol. 2, 298). Voltaire, Helvétius, Mendelssohn and Lessing were all Dubos’s disciples and Montesquieu used the Reflections to move towards a subjectivist, relativist philosophy of art.

William
Lyons,
The Infallibility, dignity and excellency of humane judgement; being a new art of reasoning and discovering truth

A plea for religious toleration from a representative of the radical wing of English Protestantism.

Andrew Michael
Ramsay,
Essai de politique (Essay on Politics)

Ramsay based his Essay on F‚nelon's principles of tolerance and pure disinterested love. In 1710 Ramsay visited France and was converted to Roman Catholicism by F‚nelon whom he worked for as a secretary. He wrote Discours de la po‚sie ‚pique et de l'excellence du poŠme de T‚l‚maque (Discourse on Poetry and on the Excellence of the Poem T‚l‚maque) as an introduction to the 1717 edition of F‚nelon's utopian political novel Aventures de T‚l‚maque fils d'Ulysse (The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses).